FUJIYAMA
A mole and protected harbor with stone docks has been built with the money finally returned to Japan by the United States, after being shamefully withheld for a quarter of a century, as our share of the Shimonoseki Indemnity Fund. The outer harbor lies so open to the prevailing south-east winds that loading and unloading is often delayed for days, and landing by launches or sampans is a wet process. The Bay is so shallow that a stiff wind quickly sends its waves breaking over the sea-wall, to subside again in a few hours into a mirror-like calm. The harbor has had its great typhoons, but does not lie in the centre of those dreaded circular storms that whirl up from the China seas. Deflected to eastward, the typhoon sends its syphoon, or wet end, to fill the air with vapor and drizzle, and a smothering, mildewy, exhausting atmosphere. A film of mist covers everything, wall-paper loosens, glued things fall apart, and humanity wilts.
Yokohama has its divisions—the Settlement, the Bluff, and Japanese Town—each of which is a considerable place by itself. The Settlement, or region originally set apart by the Japanese in 1858 for foreign merchants, was made by filling in a swampy valley opening to the Bay. This Settlement, at first separated from the Tokaido and the Japanese town of Kanagawa, has become the centre of a surrounding Japanese population of over eighty thousand. It is built up continuously to Kanagawa Bridge, two miles farther north, on the edge of a bold bluff, where the Tokaido—the East Sea Road—leading up from Kioto, reaches the Bay. In diplomatic papers Kanagawa is still recognized as the name of the great port on Yeddo Bay, although the consulates, banks, hotels, clubs, and business streets are miles away.
At the hatoba, or landing-place, the traveller is confronted by the jinrikisha, that big, two-wheeled baby-carriage of the country, which, invented by an American, has been adopted all over the East. The jinrikisha (or kuruma, as the linguist and the upper class more politely call it) ranges in price from seventeen to forty dollars, twenty being the average cost of those on the public stands. Some thrifty coolies own their vehicles, but the greater number either rent them from, or work for, companies, and each jinrikisha pays a small annual tax to the Government. An unwritten rule of the road compels these carriages to follow one another in regulated single file. The oldest or most honored person rides at the head of the line, and only a boor would attempt to change the order of arrangement. Spinning down the Bund, at a tariff so moderate that the American can ride for a week for what he must pay in a day at home, one finds the jinrikisha to be a comfortable, flying arm-chair—a little private, portable throne. The coolie wears a loose coat and waistcoat, and tights of dark-blue cotton, with straw sandals on his bare feet, and an inverted wash-bowl of straw covered with cotton on his head. When it rains he is converted into a prickly porcupine by his straw rain-coat, or he dons a queer apron and cloak of oiled paper, and, pulling up the hood of the little carriage, ties a second apron of oiled paper across the knees of his fare. At night the shafts are ornamented with a paper lantern bearing his name and his license number; and these glowworm lights, flitting through the streets and country roads in the darkness, seem only another expression of the Japanese love of the picturesque. In the country, after dark, they call warnings of ruts, holes, breaks in the road, or coming crossways; and their cries, running from one to another down the line, are not unmusical. To this smiling, polite, and amiable little pony one says Hayaku! for “hurry,” Abunayo! for “take care,” Sukoshimate! for “stop a little,” and Soro! for “slowly.” The last command is often needed when the coolie, leaning back at an acute angle to the shaft, dashes downhill at a rapid gait. Jinrikisha coolies are said even to have asked extra pay for walking slowly through the fascinating streets of open shops. If you experiment with the jinrikisha on a level road, you find that it is only the first pull that is hard; once started, the little carriage seems to run by itself. The gait of the man in the shafts, and his height, determine the comfort of the ride. A tall coolie holds the shafts too high, and tilts one at an uncomfortable angle; a very short man makes the best runner, and, with big toe curling upward, will trot along as regularly as a horse. As one looks down upon the bobbing creature below a hat and two feet seem to constitute the whole motor.
The waraji, or sandals, worn by these coolies are woven of rice straw, and cost less than five cents a pair. In the good old days they were much cheaper. Every village and farm-house make them, and every shop sells them. In their manufacture the big toe is a great assistance, as this highly trained member catches and holds the strings while the hands weave. On country roads wrecks of old waraji lie scattered where the wearer stepped out of them and ran on, while ruts and mud-holes are filled with them. For long tramps the foreigner finds the waraji and the tabi, or digitated stocking, much better than his own clumsy boots, and he ties them on as overshoes when he has rocky paths to climb. Coolies often dispense with waraji and wear heavy tabi, with a strip of the almost indestructible hechima fibre for the soles. The hechima is the gourd which furnishes the vegetable washrag, or looffa sponge of commerce. The snow-white cotton tabis of the better classes are made an important part of their costume.
Those coolies who pull and push heavily loaded carts or drays keep up a hoarse chant, which corresponds to the chorus of sailors when hauling ropes. “Hilda! Hoida!” they seem to be crying, as they brace their feet for a hard pull, and the very sound of it exhausts the listener. In the old days people were nearly deafened with these street choruses, but their use is another of the hereditary customs that is fast dying out. In mountain districts one’s chair-bearers wheeze out “Hi rikisha! Ho rikisha!” or “Ito sha! Ito sha!” as they climb the steepest paths, and they cannot keep step nor work vigorously without their chant.
CHAPTER II
YOKOHAMA
The Settlement is bounded by the creek, from whose opposite side many steep hill-roads wind up to the Bluff, where most of the foreigners have their houses. These bluff-roads pass between the hedges surrounding trim villas with their beautifully set gardens, the irregular numbering of whose gates soon catches the stranger’s eye. The first one built being number one, the others were numbered in the order of their erection, so that high and low numerals are often side by side. To coolies, servants, peddlers, and purveyors, foreign residents are best known by their street-door numeration, and “Number four Gentleman” and “Number five Lady” are recurrent and adequate descriptions. So well used are the subjects of it to this convict system of identification that they recognize their friends by their alias as readily as the natives do.